Massive Memory Leak in Firefox 2.0.0.3

Alistair

Has anyone else been forced into downgrading back to 2.0.0.2 as a result of a massive memory leak in the latest "bug fix"? At least myself (on two separate computers) and one friend have had Firefox take a HUGE amount of memory in a short period of time (600+MB, with MASSIVE swapping going on). It seemed to happen when browsing with multiple tabs and some flash in them. Its obviously a 2.0.0.3 issue as this does NOT happen in 2.0.0.2 for me. Just curious is anyone else has seen this or has more information on it.

Erroneus

No problem here, using 2.0.0.3 on two machines. Sounds like a plugin or an extension going crazy.

Using latest flash and java 6.0 on both machines, plus a ton of extensions.

>GSXR<mrbusa

Me to.
Two machines and countless extensions and themes and no issues. It is using less than 50mb with four tabs open and flash enabled.

Mousey

i dunno i never checked, looks like you've given me something to look into.
i run FF 2.0.0.3 with no themes and only DownThemAll! (DL Accelerator)

MGaz

well ATM fire fox is eating up 120 MB's of system memory. that's nothing compared to how it was one day.. i'll see if i can find the screen shot i took.

My PC crawled to an almost halt. in fact i think it slowed down so much it actually started going backwards! lol

MGaz

well ok, dummy me didn't take a pic of the memory usage, like i thought, but i can tell you it was a lot of my 1 gig.


What i did take a pic of was the cpu usage, my PC was crawling along .

FF 92% cpu usage! somethings wrong there? surely? I never had that kind of problem with IE, all IE ever use to do was crash and chuck up errors and illegal operations all the time. Silly MS garbage.

Anyway, heres the pic:

Alistair

MGaz, thats exactly what it did to a friend and I once it started using the hard drive for swapping.

aNy_oNE

MGaz, firefox goes to about 99% cpu usage for me if im loading 3-4+ tabs at once, not uncommon. (although my CPU is crap, even compared to yours xD)

PangingJr

have you tried creating a new Firefox profile, or clean out the existing profile (only leave what you need, likes cookies, bookmarks files) ?

cozumel

I don't have any problems here with FF 2.0.0.3. Working perfectly.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Time for an upgrade

...upgrade of browser that is. FF does this with alot of tabs open, if I have like 30 tabs open my PC grinds to absolute 0 power.

Never had this problem with Opera, never dared try with IE

GutterPunk

I had 53 tabs open in IE w/o a problem.

FF yes the same problem and opera is ok

PangingJr

i use this below Firefox build in Vista right now...
Tete's Firefox 2.0.0.3 [2007032116 en-US win32 tete009 sse pgo]
Visual C++ 2005 SP1 (PGO) build, and CPU Instruction Set SSE3 Beta DLL (December 8, 2006) - http://www1.plala.or.jp/tete009/en-U...html#FFRELEASE

when tested with no Add-ons, no Flash (Proxomitron), and with 50 tabs opened, i can hardly see any system performance drop off/down.

GutterPunk

I wonder, I tested mine on XP

Im going to go home and test it on my Vista

Alistair

I have managed to come up with a way to trigger this memory leak on a consistent basis.

Step 1: Open Task Manager and sort by memory usage. (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC)
Step 2: Open Firefox
Step 3: Browse to a website
Step 4: Open new browser tab (CTRL+T)
Step 5: Navigate to chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Step 6: Right-Click View Source
Step 7: Close View Source Window
Step 8: Close Tab opened above.
Step 9: Sit back and watch your memory usage climb.

PangingJr

followed every steps there, and then left it for 10 mins, the system memory usage was about the same, there was not much going on here at all.

unless I missed something?

Alistair

Bon Echo? wasn't that a development build? This was the production 2.0.0.3 release I encounter this on. It is happening on 5 different machines for me all using these steps. There is no common extension shared on all systems either. The only similarity on them is that they are all on a 64-bit builds of Windows (XP and Vista).

aNy_oNE

I have ordinary 32bit WinXP Pro, and I did those things, memory usage stayed exactly the same. Firefox is normal 2.0.0.3 from the automatic update thing.

PangingJr

since you have problem with the specific build version, and so, of course, it won't be able to serve you well under your systems, i suppose i can only tell you that if i were you i could always try and use different builds of the Firefox, there are so many Firefox builds out there either milestone, branch, trunk, or nightly builds.
an alternate way would be to change back to the older build version if i found there was no problem with it.
one thing different between IE and Firefox is: there are new builds of Firefox comes out at almost every day, and a clean uninstalled and reinstalled of a Firefox can be done easily and very fast if desired.

Alistair

I have reverted most to the official release of 2.0.0.2 as that seems to lack this memory leak on them. I try to avoid the nightly builds, but experiment a bit with the latest development builds of the next generation from time to time.